17/10/2011

‘The White Trail’ by Fflur Dafydd

‘The White Trail’ is the new novel by UEA alumna Fflur Dafydd and is published by Seren this week. A contemporary retelling of the medieval Welsh folk tale, ‘Culhwch and Olwen’, it is the fifth in Seren’s series of reworkings from the
Mabinogion epic, the first of which was ‘White Ravens’, published by UEA alumus Owen Sheers in 2009. Fflur graduated from the Prose Fiction MA in
2000, having already published a collection of stories and poems, ‘Y Gwir Am Gelwydd’ ( ‘The Truth About Lies’), at the age of 20. She subsequently gained a PhD on the poetry of R.S. Thomas from the University of Wales, and published her first novel ‘Lliwiau Liw Nos’ (‘Colours by Night’) in 2005. Her second novel ‘Atyniad’
(‘Attraction’) won the prose medal at the National Eisteddfod of Wales in 2006 and she published her first English-language novel, ‘Twenty Thousand
Saints’ in 2008, for which she received the Oxfam Hay Emerging Writer of the Year Award. Her most recent Welsh-language novel is ‘Y Llyfrgell’
(‘The Library’), which won the 2009 National Eisteddfod of Wales Daniel Owen Memorial Prize and the inaugural Max Boyce Prize in 2010.